The jail in the former Butte City Hall was a grim place in its heyday and its now part of tours of the city's underground. / TRIBUNE PHOTO/KRISTEN INBODY

A former speakeasy in the historic Rookwood Hotel was disguised so well it was lost for decades in Uptown Butte. / TRIBUNE PHOTO/KRISTEN INBODY

Go UndergroundOld Butte Historical Adventures offers several tours of Butte’s underground, focusing on different themes and locations. Tours may be booked at 498-3424 or at 117 North Main. During the summer, tours are offered at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Monday through Saturday, with tours at other times by arrangement. Learn more at buttetours.info.

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BUTTE — Reading about Montana during Prohibition is an entirely different experience from stepping in a historic speakeasy or a dark jail.

Even as a native son of nearby Opportunity, former history teacher Ed Barich of Clyde Park still had a few things to learn on a recent tour of Butte Underground.

“This tour was so great,” he said. “A lot I knew growing up in this area, but I didn’t realize all the stories about the police department, and seeing a speakeasy up close was cool. It’s really cool to learn to things.”

In the 1910s, Butte was home to 100,000 people “crammed in tight” uphill from where Interstate 90 divides the city now.

The noise must have been overwhelming, as stamp mills crushed ore and whistles sounded at mines. The sidewalks were packed.

Everything ran 24/7, from the trolleys along 40 miles of track to the mines to the entertainment. With Butte a significant stop on the vaudeville circuit, author Mark Twain and aviator Charles Lindbergh came to the city. Charlie Chaplin left tired and praised Butte for having the prettiest prostitutes in the country, with 800 women working the red light district per shift.

“It’s hard to picture Butte as a busy city,” said Bob McMurray of Old Butte Historical Adventures, which offers four tours of Butte Underground. “When the mines shut, the town shut.”

“Friction fires” — caused by the mortgage payment rubbing against the fire insurance policy — chipped away at Uptown Butte in the 1970s, McMurray said. But the spectacular buildings remain that testify to the days when Butte was booming.

Commerce, legitimate and otherwise

Basements were a quick way to add retail space, and about 130 companies operated out of the lower level, with patrons accessing them via the subterranean level of the city’s double-decker sidewalk, McMurray said.

Pollution was so thick the lights were on all the time, and sulfuric acid tainted the rain. That and the noise made basements even more appealing.

And there were other uses for the second city.

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Alongside the eight-story Hirbour Tower, one of the first three skyscrapers built west of the Mississippi River, a small staircase leads to the lower sidewalk. Bucket by bucket, McMurray, carpenter by trade, carried 21,000 pounds of dirt, rubble and debris up the stairs and unearthed the 1901 boardwalk and granite block walls, which were covered with brick and then a cement facade originally.

As McMurray led a tour below the Hirbour a few years ago, a 93-year-old Butte woman remarked that she didn’t see what was so special about the barbershop, to which she often was sent to by her mom to find her dad. She seemed to have just missed him every time.

“Her eyes got so big” when McMurray opened a narrow door in the barber shop disguised as a vault and led her into a modest speakeasy.

“You’d come for a cut and go out with a buzz,” he said.

More than 150 speakeasies operated in Butte during Prohibition. Operators could expect their speakeasy to be raided every two to three years during the 13 years of Prohibition.

Other mementos of the Jazz Age remain, too, and McMurray uses them to explain the era.

In the basement of the former Clinton Drugstore, 18 crates that once held Prohibition whiskey emerged. But don’t worry, it was “medicinal” whiskey and doctor-prescribed.

In a former Butte car dealership, illegal hooch labled as wax emerged from behind a false wall, giving new meaning to “polish one off.” An old dairy had milk bottles painted white to conceal their real contents.

The greatest find was in a closet of the Rookwood Hotel, a grand building erected in 1912 for $30,000, with Tudor arches and marble wainscoting and flooring imported from Florence, Italy, and cut and fitted in Butte.

During a cleanup of the building, the coat closet down the stairs was found with coats still in place. When they took down the mirror, they found a hole that looked into a speakeasy lost for 60 years.

The mirror was a two-way mirror, they discovered. Through the opening, the former operators of the speakeasy would say, “Speak easy, speak softly and tell me your code word.”

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On a recent tour, nearly everyone who stepped into the room said, “Oh, wow.”

And they had reason to gush. The room is decorated with mahogany woodwork with elephant hide insets, elaborate columns and marble trim.

The betting board is in place, and chips are on the poker table.

A high-end 1928 Stetson with a Herbert Hoover for president button was among the finds, too, likely a trophy given the button and Hoover’s unpopularity in the city and John B. Stetson Co. as a unionless shop.

On the bar is a medical prescription for whiskey from Choteau’s Dr. Bateman, newspaper stories of raids and a $2 bill and buffalo nickles found during the restoration. According to an article, when the speakeasy was raided only four men went to jail.

McMurray said the Rookwood speakeasy likely was a hangout for the city’s elite. He demonstrated how when the feds raided the speakeasy local authorities enjoying the booze and betting could slip into the bathroom and circle behind the authorities to appear to have been part of the raid.

Behind bars

Butte’s reputation “for being brutal” was only enforced in its city jail, McMurray said. It was in the basement of the former city hall for 81 years, from 1890 to 1971.

Trip hazards were plentiful, and angry jailers could make the most of them to rough up prisoners.

“If you got mouthy, the cops had these for you,” McMurray said, holding a “blackjack” in a cell displaying artifacts of the police department. Blackjacks had lead weights for effective striking.

The same cell displays officers killed in the line of duty, among them Police Chief Jeremiah Murphy, killed in a scuffle with a miner three doors down from the station in the 1930s. He was known as “Jerry the Wise” after he got word the notorious Al Capone was coming to Butte and responded with an offer of dinner and an escort directly back to the train station. The mobster didn’t return.

One of the most interesting artifacts in the jail is a 1956 reckless driving arrest record for Robert Knievel, along with that of William Knoffel.

“We told the family we wouldn’t post all Evel Knievel’s records,” McMurray said.

The women’s cell was the “luxury” cell, McMurray said. The jail topped 100 degrees since the city hall’s boiler was in the basement, too, but women had a window for fresh air. Their bunks were only two beds high instead of three and they got a mattress, though it was only 1-inch thick. The jail typically had 40 percent more prisoners than beds.

On one side one can see steps that led from the lower sidewalk up to city hall. A public humiliation cell looked out onto the sub-sidewalk. On the other side, McMurray said, people were interrogated for six to eight hours. The heat was intense, and the blackness complete. Brass knuckles and chains were found in the rubble of the room.

In 1971, Keith Earl Johnson, 20, killed himself in the jail, according to the coroner’s inquest, though the circumstances were suspicious, and the federal government shut down the jail as a “dungeon.”